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Saturday, January 5, 2013

Homemade classroom goodies!

While I spent most of my Christmas break with my family visiting from Ireland, I have been able to in the past two days to really crank out some homemade new learning activities for my reading centers and my upgraded math centers.

Firstly, I would strongly recommend that you look at this link. This is where I got the ideas to make all of these centers and where I will be going to get more ideas. It also includes a sample worksheet that you can use with each center! I will probably just have students record work on notebook paper to save on paper (it is scarce!).

Word Family Cans

I used snack size cans for the container, milk/orange juice lids and notecards to create a great review center for students doing word work.

Students will record their created REAL words to turn in for accountability.

Paint Stick Sentences

I used paint sticks from Home Depot, clothespins and notecards (although when I can, I will probably find some flash cards to use instead).

Students will take a notecard with a clothespin to plug into the sentences on the paint sticks to create a sentence that makes sense. They will then write down their new sentence.

I think this will be very helpful for my ESL students because I'm trying to use visuals to help them understand a patten in sentence structure.

Dolch Word Cards

I cut apart paint cards from Home Depot to write the Dolch words from each list to sort into groups. Now I may use these as a practice flash card center or what I really like to do is make a telephone center.

For the telephone center, you have two telephones linked to each other. One student calls the other, the student will say one of the Dolch words to the other, then they must write the word correctly. The student will hold up the word they wrote, the caller will check it; if the word is correct then they hang up and switch roles.

I am doing something brand new in Math. I've been really happy with using the Daily 5 for reading. The students love it and I've seen tremendous improvement in almost every student. I was looking for a way to bring that kind of excitement and results to math when I found BUILD.

They are math centers set up a lot like the Daily 5 with a lot of independence. It stands for:

Buddy Games

Using Manipulatives

Independent Working/Reading

Learning about Numbers

Doing Math

I'm going to start with whole group math and then pull small groups for reteaching and reinforcement while the rest of the class is doing their BUILD centers. I am so excited and I think the students will be too!

Clothespin Facts

To help build (ha ha) up their knowledge about fact families, students will choose a number on a notecard and then must find facts in the container that equal that number. Students will write down their answers on an accountability sheet for every BUILD station (just notebook paper for me!).

The first one I've made is just addition facts for numbers 8-18 that have switched factors. I tried to focus on double, double plus 1, and plus ten facts when choosing the facts. I think for my next one I'll have just subtraction and then maybe mix them once the students get really good at this.

Math BANG!

This is a fun game that just requires popsicle sticks with math concepts and skills written on them (mainly for review) and some sticks with the word BANG! written on them.

To play this game, a group of students would take turns drawing sticks from the container. If the student can answer the stick correctly, then they get to keep the stick. They keep playing until someone draws a stick that says BANG! which means that round is over and whoever has the most sticks won that round. The sticks go back in and the game restarts.

I think my students will love this :)

I looking forward to kicking off the new year will all of these new goodies! I will continue to be posting more homemade things that I make so you can see what we're up to in class and you might want to make your own!